On one hand it makes it that much closer to being WoW for Dummies. On the other hand, it may become a useful tool for those that don't raid full time. Either way you cut it, I want to know your thoughts and opinions. So, what do you think? Good or Bad?

BigTwoHorns wrote:On one hand it makes it that much closer to being WoW for Dummies. On the other hand, it may become a useful tool for those that don't raid full time. Either way you cut it, I want to know your thoughts and opinions. So, what do you think? Good or Bad?

It does neither BTH. You cannot tell me that having an in-game resource of a boss's abilities is "WoW for Dummies" if you have EVER gone to WoWHead, WoWwiki, Tankspot, L2Raid, etc and looked up what a boss ability does. This is a great tool that should have been in since the beginning. It doesn't tell you the strategy, all it does is tells you what an ability does and when (as far as phase goes) an ability will happen. This is a great tool for people that raid all the time, especially for my guild, since we don't require fight videos, we would much rather go into a fight and learn it first hand, and then go to WoWhead after we wipe to see what ability we wiped to and why.

I agree, this is just basic info that should have been part of the game from the get-go.

One part of it that makes it enormously useful for a raid/dungeon leader is the ability to pull up the boss, and shift-click an ability of that boss into group/raid chat. When anyone else clicks on that spell, it takes them into the Dungeon Journal and shows the details of the spell right there.

Being able to directly point out the exact boss ability that raiders need to focus on ahead of time is such a nice change, as opposed to waiting until you die, scrolling back through the combatlog, and trying to find that one weird ability that did something, but nobody can remember what the name.

I guess I shouldn't have used "WoW for Dummies" It's a phrase my wife and I use jokingly when talking about new tools and such that Blizz puts into the game. As for the sites you mentioned, I have used a few as well and in the same way as this:

We would much rather go into a fight and learn it first hand, and then go to WoWhead after we wipe to see what ability we wiped to and why.

BigTwoHorns wrote:I guess I shouldn't have used "WoW for Dummies" It's a phrase my wife and I use jokingly when talking about new tools and such that Blizz puts into the game. As for the sites you mentioned, I have used a few as well and in the same way as this:

We would much rather go into a fight and learn it first hand, and then go to WoWhead after we wipe to see what ability we wiped to and why.

Is this in the PTR yet?

PTR = Live when talking about learning a fight sterile. Before this journal, you could go onto the PTR and test a fight, there would be nothing to tell you what happened, so you learned it the hard way, but you didn't "cheat" and go by a carefully scripted strategy, we figured it out for ourselves. This feature doesn't tell you how to do the fight, only what happens in the fights and roughly when it will happen, so the "game-breaking"ness of it is very low. We already have access to this information and most players that will be using this, already access that information from a 3rd party source. This just brings more of it "in-house". Like the introduction of the Equipment Manager and the Quest Indicators on the Map, they were already being used by a significant portion of the population, they just brought them into the game.

Honestly? I think people are overhyping the impact of this journal, everyone watches how fights are done on youtube and stuff nowdays, I doubt very few (like myself) just read the abilities on like wowhead or wowpedia and then try to see it in action after. I bet after a month no one will even be using it except to check what loot drops off the boss, which is nice as it saves me from having to tab out to check.